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Monday, December 29, 2008

South Bank: A Cheap Fishing Expedition For A Publisher

Yesterday was my first day at home in several, after various Christmas adventures at work and elsewhere. I was exhausted after the Festive season, and so cold I might have snapped if somebody had nudged me.

For hours I did nothing except sleep, doze and listen to football on the radio. Then, in the evening, I put a Lee "Scratch" Perry album on, and instead of writing the thought I had down in my journal, I wrote it in a poem. I did a Kerouac and let the size of my notebook (A-6), dictate the length of the lines and ultimately, when I stopped.

It came out beautifully, and very easily. I wrote another, and then another, and before I knew it I had lots of them, all around one theme: my memories of South Bank, the care home where I worked, that mad season when, after a lifetime of being ignored by the fairer sex, I had two lovely women express an interest in me in the same month.

How and why that happened I still don't know. Ultimately, I lost both of them and since then I've had a dearth of interest like nobody would believe. But it did happen! and when I start to feel sorry for myself or jealous of other men's sexual attraction, I do occasionally think about it. It lifts my chin up from my chest.

The poems I wrote in that surge of inspiration--I finished the cycle in the dark this morning--tell the story of how I loved and lost. I'm calling the collection they constitute, brilliantly I think, "South Bank". If anybody knows a publisher out there who might be interested in giving it a look, please tell.